Hardware: Destructor Mousepad and DeathAdder Guild Wars Edition

Carolyn Koh gives us a quick look at and her impressions of both the Razer Destructor Pro Mousing Surface and the DeathAdder Guild Wars Edition Mouse.

Razer Destructor Pro Mousing Surface

The Razer Destructor Pro mousing surface is the latest mouse pad offering from Razer. A hard surface, this mouse pad is larger than your average mouse pad and as it is a hard surface, is thinner than your average padded cloth mouse pad.

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In order to develop this mouse pad, Razer called on pro-gaming teams for their help and the resulting product has earned their endorsements – which are printed on the product box itself. It is shipped in a beautiful padded case with a cut-out foam insert for easy transport to and from LAN parties and competitions. You wouldn’t want to accidentally bend this puppy!

The surface is a proprietary development they call the Razer Fractal ™ - a highly reactive finish in a gunmetal grey. This gaming surface is a generous 13.75” x 11” providing plenty of mousing space and ultra thin at 0.9” so many will not require a wrist rest for comfort. The bottom is a thin layer of textured rubber that doesn’t slip on polished wood, tile nor glass. In fact, it grips so well, you cannot slide it easily to position but is easier to pick up one end of it.

Razer states that their testing has shown that optical mice track up to 25%, and laser mice track up to 37% better on the Destructor than cloth pads. I’ve always observed that hard mouse pads track better than cloth, and I am inclined to believe those figures.

Razer boasts that the surface provides superior tactility – it does have feel at once textured yet slick; improved responsiveness – I’ve used if for a month in various programs including Photoshop and agree; and enhanced tracking – again, using it in Photoshop attests to that. I loaned it to a friend that uses Photoshop in his work regularly and almost had to wrest it back out of his hands.

Conclusion

How have I liked it? Immediately, from the moment I used it, I was impressed. The Razer DeathAdder GuildWars Edition mouse that I was also reviewing skimmed over that surface as lightly as an ice skater on ice. I brought it in to work one day to see if it would improve my aim in Peggle (at lunch of course!) with the crappy laptop mouse I use at work (no precision work required). It did. If there is one mousing surface I recommend this year, it is the Razer Destructor. No need for a speed surface and an accuracy surface. This provides it all.

Pros

Cons

Response cannot be beat

Absolutely non slip – that and thinness of mat means no accidental jogging of the mat

Size – one definitely needs the desktop real estate to make full use of this mousepad

Razer DeathAdder - GuildWars Edition

That said, let’s move over to the GuildWars Edition of the Razer DeathAdder. The regular DeathAdder mouse garnered several editors choice awards in 2007 soon after it was launched, and it was the first Razer mouse reviewed here at MMORPG.com.

Upon examination, I found the mouse to have the same form factor as the Microsoft Habu – a collaboration between Razer and Microsoft. It is the same size. Has the same large hump in the back and it is a right handed mouse.

Features:

1800dpi Razer Precision™ 3G infrared sensor with on-the-fly sensitivity adjustment to allow you to switch from high response needs to slower, UI intensive needs such as tradeskills and auction house clicking.

1000Hz Ultrapolling™ / 1ms response, 6400 frames per second (5.8 megapixels per second) with 16-bit ultra-wide data path to transfer that data to your PC. Five independently programmable buttons – Left and right, two thumb buttons and the wheel is also clickable

60–120 inches per second and 15g of acceleration

Always On – this feature is always nice for an MMOG player when you have rest and recovery periods between battles or waiting for a raid to form up. There is no lag while you wait for the mouse engine to wake up and catch up with your movement.

Goldplated connector, teflon feet and seven foot long cord – Can’t forget to mention those ultra-large, ultra-smooth Teflon feet! These are the “extra touches” to an already good product that helps boost it into the “great” category.

Goldplated connectors seem to be a sign of quality in consumer electronics these days. You find it on everything from banana plugs to USB ports, and all Razer products will have this feature. The seven foot long non-tangle cord is nice. Like many computer users, my PC is on one side of my desk, my keyboard and mouse on the other and all the cords trail everywhere, some long enough to go into the cord manager, some not. The extra long cord allowed me to manage my cords and wires with ease, yet gave me plenty of play to move the mouse around, even tip back on my chair and use the mouse on my lap if I chose.

The top of the mouse including the buttons is a single layer with a split up the center for the two buttons to move independently. It feels like hardened rubber. With enough texture to feel that your hand will not slip, with enough smoothness to be silky. The heel of my palm actually rests on the mouse-pad and my hand rests on the mouse with the fingers and thumb just in the right place on the buttons when I’m lazy.

This mouse is light enough to be used with finger-tip control – that is to say, with the hand hovering above the mouse. The buttons are responsive without being overly sensitive nor requires a great effort to click them with the wheel requiring a bit more pressure that I find more comfortable with my hand resting on the mouse.

Why the GuildWars edition then? The difference is only in the aesthetics. This mouse was made in collaboration with Arena Net to appeal to GuildWars fans and is actually more expensive than the regular DeathAdder. It comes with a piece of GuildWars art on the inside cover of the box. The buttons glow golden amber and the GuildWars logo that replaces the Razer logo does a cool slow blink. Brightening and then dimming to nothing. Rinse, repeat.

Use and Conclusion

It took me a while to get used to the mouse as it is much larger and has a higher profile than the Diamondback that was my regular gaming mouse. However, the more I used it, the more comfortable I grew with it. I liked the silky feel of the rubberized surface, the responsive but not too sensitive buttons (an issue I sometimes had with the Diamondback) and the accuracy. Perhaps it had to do with using it on the Destructor mouse pad as well, but this mouse has now become my gaming mouse as well as working mouse. There’s a degree of personal taste and ergonomic requirement in every mouse, so I will still caution players to make a personal choice, but I like this mouse very well indeed.

Pros

Cons

Excellent ergonomics with large, non-slip, flanged mouse buttons

Always On mode – essential for an MMOG player

On the fly sensitivity adjustment – great feature for the MMOG player, for the many different in-game activities.

Price – is the GW bling really worth an additional $10?

No on-board memory – although this is not such an issue for MMOG players, it would have been a nice feature to have.

May be uncomfortable for those with smaller hands

Carolyn Koh / Carolyn has been writing for MMORPG.com since 2004 and about the MMO genre since 1999. These days she plays mobile RTS games more, but MMOs will always remain near and dear to her heart.